Midterms as Victory FOR Money in Politics

George Will cautions against "giddiness" in the wake of the midterms, concluding with a warning we should heed that the President is not well.

The whole thing is worth a read, but Will fleshes out a point I merely noted in passing yesterday: that Elon Musk's waste of hundreds of millions in Texas political spending is a a great counterexample to the idea that we should limit political spending by individuals. (We set aside for the moment the fact that such bans should be opposed as violations of individual rights.):

The importance of money in politics is more asserted and deplored than measured. In Texas, Elon Musk, the most overrated dabbler in U.S. politics, perhaps did something useful with his estimated $224 million money geyser for Republicans. He unintentionally demonstrated that there is a point at which the utility of political dollars not only declines steeply, but actually becomes negative. Senator-elect James Talarico prospered politically while saying, "Texas is not for sale."

Furthermore, all political spending funds, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political speech. Those who have nothing intelligent, interesting, pertinent or plausible to say will injure themselves by lavish spending that makes this absence obvious. Vivek Ramaswamy will not be Ohio's governor (or a Republican presidential candidate again), in part because of a campaign ad (featuring his opponent's mother) that will live in political lore as a spectacular act of self-harm. [bold added]

Yes, again, just dumping money into political ads still depends on those ads persuading voters. But I had not considered the second case: If someone is a big enough ass, it can be a good thing that he is well able to get the word out before he comes to power.

The 2026 midterms way well have been a victory for freedom of speech, even if an accidental one.

-- CAV

Some Center-Left Sanity

As if to echo political scientists warning Democrats not to read too much into Trump's election-day wipeout, the Washington Post considers a couple of nasty themes that always come up when Democrats win nationally: taxing "the rich" and preventing "the rich" from spending their own money in elections.

(See also: "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business" by Ayn Rand, which, alas, continues to age like fine wine.)

The editorial's point of departure is California, where dueling ballot measures are polling in exactly the opposite way one might expect from the Republicans' drubbing last week:

And it still does not appear to have been enough to get California voters to approve a wealth tax. Proposition 40 is losing by about 10 points, with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted as of Friday. Proposition 42, a competing ballot measure that would prohibit new state wealth taxes and retroactive taxes, is on track to pass.

That is excellent news, and the piece analyzes both how hard it would be to make this folly federal law, as well as how bad it would be for American innovation.

But that's not all! as the infomercials always say. The piece also notes that the last Tuesday has provided an undeniable counterexample to the notion that "the rich" can buy elections, and so must therefore be prevented from spending their own money in the exercise of their inalienable right to freedom of speech:

When voters started to understand these realities, and the polling turned against the measure, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) cried foul, criticizing billionaires' spending for tainting the results. Did he really expect them to do nothing while he bragged about taking 5 percent of everything they own?

It isn't as though spending determines election results, as Tuesday's elections elsewhere proved. Elon Musk, the world's richest man on paper, spent more than anyone ever has in a single election cycle, backing Republicans who got slaughtered. If California voters were bothered by billionaires' activism, they could have told them to take a hike, just like Texas voters did to Musk.

Hats off to the editorial board of the Washington Post. While I wouldn't bet on Democrats heeding their wise words, it is good to hear them coming from somewhere.

An argument I saw, but can't place, noted that many of the new Democrats in Congress are moderates, meaning that the Dem-Socialists won't enjoy their recent outsized power as crucial members of a very thin majority. I wouldn't put the odds of a sane Democrat majority as very high, but perhaps they are nonzero.

That's certainly better than zero, particularly since it remains possible that the brain-dead ignoramuses of MAGA could continue controlling the GOP, despite this obvious-but-to them repudiation.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Alex Tabarrok shows off his "sky roomba" robotic window cleaner and makes a good economics point while he's at it.

I'm going to look into getting one of these...

2. A role-playing enthusiast, upon reading phrases like apply your full hp to the task in a text from a century ago knows that the abbreviation doesn't stand for hit points -- and makes the neat/amusing connection that:

a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I, being older, might have realized the author meant horsepower, but I had never heard it used colloquially in such a way.

3. The same blogger also considers an [a]lternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped. I like the alterate term for television.

4. An attorney explains the origin of the annoying practice of following written numbers with Arabic numerals in parentheses.

In "Five (5) Reasons to Stop Writing Numbers Like This," Andrew Schrack notes that:

The convention originated with handwritten documents, in which it was easy for numbers to be confused. (I've personally had my scribbled "9" mistaken for a "7"). Numbers also could be altered easily by inserting extra numerals or attempting to transform a 3 into an 8. In fact, the easy alteration of numerals is the reason that we spell out the numbers on our checks (for those of us who still use checks). Still, numerals are easier to read at a glance, and so early legal writers included both.

Schrack is correct that the practice is not just obsolete, but can create problems, such as less-legible documents and ambiguity.

(And now I know, and don't have to be content with merely laughing at the practice.)

-- CAV

A Decent Post-Election Roundup

I'd planned to take my usual Thursday off from politics, but changed my mind after stopping by electoral-vote.com, which presents its first updates after the election on its blog.

Keeping in mind that the site is center-left, you mileage will vary from the comprehensive news roundup, through the humorous look at Republican reaction (Don Bacon (R-Blue Dot) was a funny touch.), to a post possibly exemplifying the very hubris the roundup warned against (Nationalize SpaceX and deport Musk? Voters just rejected Trump's agenda. I can't tell whether this is a joke in today's era of Poe's Law applying to both "sides" of the political spectrum.)

I'll leave you with samples from the news roundup post, which includes warnings against more of the same from Republicans:

It turns out that cults have a shelf life and when the cultist-in-chief falls, he takes the whole cult down with him. Republicans are about to learn this the hard way. In 2028, they can offer more of the same, but the voters don't want more of the same. But that is all the Republicans have. Going back to a kinder, gentler George H.W. Bush party would be quite a trick. That isn't what the Republican Party stands for anymore. Does it stand for anything? In 2020, the Republican Party didn't even bother writing a platform. It just said: "Whatever Donald Trump wants, that's what we want." That's not a political party. That's a cult of personality. Does the institutional Republican Party actually stand for anything? ...

... and against Democrat hubris:

Democrats read the wrong message into the midterms at their peril. They didn't win. The other guys lost. There is a huge difference. People don't like the Democrats. Millions of people see them as weak and woke and think they can't even tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They got more senators, representatives, governors, and state legislators because the voters thought the other guys were corrupt and raised the price of gas. That is not a winning formula for 2028...

The section about dummymandering is interesting, and shows that Trump's gerrymandering did indeed backfire in Texas.

-- CAV

Earth to GOP...

Your boss is the American People, NOT Donald Trump.

***

Rogue government employee Donald Trump got almost as bad a performance review from his boss as he deserved yesterday, in the form of firings of some of his fellow delinquents in both houses of Congress and seeing four red-state governorships (including Texas!) flip to the Democrats.

As I said in part this morning, "I greeted this morning's news with the same kind of relief I used to feel when the Republican won the Presidency."

The primary mission was accomplished yesterday: get some control over Trump and repudiate his cult-like, anti-American "MAGA" movement.

According to electoral-vote.com and RealClear Politics, the Democrats lead the Senate 54-44 (with Alaska and Mississippi too close to call), the House 236-148 (with 51 uncalled), and the majority of state governorships at 27-20 so far. The political significance of this spanking was not lost on the folks at the former site:

This election made the 2028 Republican presidential primaries a lot more messy. There will be a MAGA lane, there will be a non-MAGA lane, and each will attract a bunch of candidates. It is no longer plausible that Donald Trump could bestow his blessing on, say, J.D. Vance, and that's the end of it.

If this just keeps Vance out of the White House, it would be great news by itself, but it probably does open the door for a better Republican candidacy in 2028, which we will want, because the Democrats are (also) not exactly who we need running everything.

There is much to digest, so I'll leave with a smattering of notable news:

• Most of us saw Talarico beating Paxton, but justice was truly served by Trump's policy of placing loyalty above even sentience failing in South Carolina, where Darline Graham lost her Senate seat. (This was an early indicator, being on the East Coast as it was, that a rout was coming.)
• It was not all good news. In one race where it would have been better for a Republican to win, Michigan elected anti-Semitic "progressive" Abdul El-Sayed.
• Among other upsets, Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in almost a century, shadowing Texas and South Carolina's mere decades of Republican control.
• Mississippi may yet elect its first black Senator since Reconstruction:

  Even observers who predicted a "blue wave" was coming express surprise at the magnitude of the Democrats' showing, producing historic victories in Senate races in Kansas and running in a statistical tie in Mississippi, of all places. There, under-funded African American lawyer Scott Colom ran a spirited, humorous, and aspirational campaign against Sen. Hyde-Smith in a race that was too close to call going into the morning hours.

  I heard that Colom leads by 28 votes. I hope he ends up winning by 47.
• Proposition 40, California's billionaire tax, hasn't been called yet, but is trailing. A loss for that would be good news.
• In probably the worst news of the night, data centers felt the misdirected ire of voters in various races.

That's it for now. The results are incomplete and there will be much more to digest, both in terms of what this means for the rest of the Trump term and for the remaining lame duck congressional session.

-- CAV

Three Election-Day Scenarios

The BBC considers how today's elections might turn out and offers three possible outcomes -- Democratic wave, Democratic trickle, and a good night for Republicans -- as well as why each could occur, based on polling data and its limitations.

More importantly, it offers early signs as the results come in for election-watchers who value their sleep.

I value my sleep even more than most and almost always skip the news entirely on election nights, and plan to do the same here.

Nevertheless, if I do end up hearing news while I'm up, I like the idea that I could have some idea of what's going on, so I'll note the respective sets of early signs here:

• Dem Wave

  If Democrats hold targeted House contests in Florida and win some Republican districts in North Carolina, Michigan, New York, Virginia and Kentucky. If they flip the Senate seat in South Carolina, it's going to be a good night for Democrats.

• Dem Trickle

  If Florida stays comfortably Republican across the board. If Democrats pick up some House seats in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania, but the Republican incumbents on more secure political ground across the country avoid getting washed away in a deluge.

• GOP Hold

  If Senators Ashley Moody in Florida and Jon Husted in Ohio cruise to re-election. If Republicans hold their own in House races in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and they flip current Democratic seats in North Carolina, Ohio and Florida.

For reasons I noted yesterday, the last of these possible results would be the worst: There would be nothing to stop the corrupt, traitorous Lunatic-in-Chief for the next two years; and his party will have been rewarded for its disgraceful subservience to one person over its duty to its country. Obviously, there would be no incentive for anyone in that party to reconsider that loyalty or the anti-freedom course that party has taken as a result.

The second would offer only the possibility that Congress might put the brakes on some of what Trump might want to do, but there would also be no reckoning within the GOP about Trump. (And, since The Democrats largely oppose Trump for the wrong reasons, they might conceivably stop only what little good Trump might still accomplish.)

The first result is what Trump and his supine party have put us into the position of wanting to occur.

-- CAV

Vote to Contain Trump and Slap Sense Into GOP

I have already followed my advice -- to vote for Democrats or independents when possible and abstain otherwise -- in early voting. I agree with Peter Schwartz, who made that case clearly and economically recently on his Substack, where he concluded:

Republicans are now in thrall to Trump. They make possible his dismissal of legal constraints. The only way to neutralize Trump, then, is through a Congress controlled by Democrats. Yes, even if they are "democratic socialists." A president aided in his refusal to acknowledge the rule of law by an acquiescent Congress, is a far greater threat than legislators who want to enact socialized medicine or a ban on gasoline-powered cars.

If I were to point a voter to one piece, that would be it, but two others, both by conservative outlets, that could nevertheless appear side-by-side as a point-counterpoint can also help.

Interestingly for the pair, the one making the case for voting Republican will, upon further reflection on what the Republicans have done under Trump, really just seal the case for voting for the Democrats, as awful as they are.

The pro-Republican piece paints an ugly, but realistic picture of what the Democrats will try to do if they win and -- as they always do -- pretend they have a radical mandate:

Nor is it merely those who fly under the DSA flag who indicate that their desire is really to permanently end the American system. Dan McLaughlin of National Review may be a little bit squishy to some readers, but he acknowledged the truth of this when he recently tweeted: "The single, overriding question of our politics is whether Democrats will shatter our constitutional order in 2029-30. All other questions are secondary."

A win in the midterms will be the beginning of this shattering. 2028 presidential contender Kamala Harris said in an interview this week that if Democrats take control of Congress, they ought to begin by packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the Electoral College...

This is ugly indeed, and these are all things I have stood against for my entire adult life.

It's too bad that, as National Review Online points out in "A List of Things Democrats Might Do if They Retake Power," the Republicans have been doing these very things to a degree the DSA could only dream of.

Here are just four of them, with links included:

1. Blowing out the national debt on a party-line vote that bypasses the Senate filibuster.
2. Threatening to eliminate the filibuster entirely to shove through partisan legislation.
3. Threatening to remove judges who rule against the party in power.
4. Openly circumventing Supreme Court decisions through extralegal executive actions.

There are twenty-one more of these. Please take your time to read them if you are still considering a vote to continue enabling Trump -- of whom I would be a huge fan if I were a leftist.

America once had a party of intrusive government and a party that at least tried to get in its way. We now have two anti-freedom parties of intrusive government.

In addition to the urgent need to bring Trump under some kind of control, this election could represent the opportunity to send the GOP a message. If there is any chance of shocking the Republican party into remembering that its boss is the American People, and not Donald Trump, and recalling the principles that brought them success -- as imperfectly as they understood or applied them -- this election is that chance.

-- CAV